Title Blood sugar : racial pharmacology and food justice in Black America / Anthony Ryan Hatch

Published Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2016] ©2016

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Description 1 online resource (xii, 166 pages) Series UPCC book collections on Project MUSE. Political Science and Policy Studies Contents Race, biomedicine, and health injustice -- The emergence of metabolic syndrome -- The scientific racism of metabolism -- Killer applications : the racial pharmacology of prescription drugs -- Sugar stained with blood : African Americans, sugar, and modern agriculture -- Metabolic insurrection Summary Why do African Americans have exceptionally high rates of hypertension, diabetes, and obesity? Is it their genes? Their disease-prone culture? Their poor diets? Such racist explanations for racial inequalities in metabolic health have circulated in medical journals for decades. Blood Sugar analyzes and challenges the ways in which "metabolic syndrome" has become a major biomedical category that medical researchers have created to better understand the risks high blood pressure, blood sugar, body fat, and cholesterol pose to people. An estimated sixty million Americans are well on the way to being diagnosed with it, many of them belonging to people of color. Anthony Ryan Hatch argues that the syndrome represents another, very real crisis and that its advent signals a new form of "colorblind scientific racism"--a repackaging of race within biomedical and genomic research. Examining the cultural discussions and scientific practices that target human metabolism of prescription drugs and sugar by African Americans, he reveals how medical researchers who use metabolic syndrome to address racial inequalities in health have in effect reconstructed race as a fixed, biological, genetic feature of bodies--without incorporating social and economic inequalities into the equation. And just as the causes of metabolic syndrome are framed in racial terms, so are potential drug treatments and nutritional health interventions. The first sustained social and political inquiry of metabolic syndrome, this provocative and timely book is a crucial contribution to the emerging literature on race and medicine. It will engage those who seek to understand how unjust power relations shape population health inequalities and the production of medical knowledge and biotechnologies Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on April 07, 2016) Subject African Americans -- Medical care -- United States Discrimination in medical care -- United States Metabolic syndrome -- Treatment African Americans. Metabolic Syndrome -- ethnology Metabolic Syndrome -- therapy Black or African American Healthcare Disparities -- ethnology Racism African American. HEALTH & FITNESS -- Diseases -- General. MEDICAL -- Clinical Medicine. MEDICAL -- Diseases. MEDICAL -- Evidence-Based Medicine. MEDICAL -- Internal Medicine. MEDICAL / History African Americans African Americans -- Medical care Discrimination in medical care United States United States Form Electronic book LC no. 2015048191 ISBN 9781452950082 1452950083 0816696179 9780816696178 9780816696185 0816696187

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